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PW No Longer has to Bite Me: So it shall be written

Okay, so there was this really nice article in Publisher’s Weekly today about me. Or it might not be today, but it will be soon. Someone sent it to me today. And they say all kinds of nice things about Stupidest Angel, and you guys, my readers, and so forth, and that’s great, so I am officially lifting the fatwa I put out on PW for calling Lamb “frat boy humor” three years ago. They gave Fluke a decent review, they gave The Stupidest Angel a rave, and now they wrote a swell bio article, so they are no longer on my shit list.

But here’s the thing, the woman who interviewed me, Natalie Danford, asked me about why my web site and my relationship with my readers seemed so personal. Evidently this is unusual. And I replied, “Well, because it is personal. I answer every e-mail I get from my readers (unless it’s unduly creepy), and they write back, and I sort of just share my end of the world with them and they do the same with me.” And then I went on to sound all literary, by saying that because I write humor, the work has a pretty strong voice, and people really get a sense of someone being there telling them the story, so by the time there’s any contact at all, my readers have hung out with me for hours. We’ve had some times. And that’s true. (None of that made it into the article, by the way.)

I’m sharing that with you guys, because after I posted about being too freaked by the election to be funny, many of you wrote to me, not just in the blog comments, but by e-mail, and you said it was okay, it would be okay, that you were fine with a few weeks of stressful rambling, and that you were going through a very similar thing…

and you know what?

Thanks. That was really fucking cool. Beyond any of the myriad pleasures of interacting with you people on the receiving end of my art, that was a major payback. So Thanks.

I was getting on a plane earlier this month, going for a quick turn around at a conference all the way across the country, and because ever since I completely destroyed my life about seventeen years ago in October, and totaled my Datsun 200SX about fifteen years ago on an October 13th, October has not been the luckiest month for me – let alone the whole seasonal defective thing I get every year when daylight savings time kicks in. So as I do sometimes, I sat Charlee down, told her where my will was, where the bank accounts were, that it was okay to sell the house, and that if she couldn’t figure out how to finish the next book, she owed money back to my publisher so don’t go buy a new Jag or something. Because flying is a perfectly unnatural act, and irony is the most powerful force in the universe, and since The Stupidest Angel actually had a chance of making the NY Times best-seller list, and I was flying in October, the unluckiest month, my plane was probably going to crash before I would ever see one of my books in the top 15. That’s how the Universe works, right?

And she said, and I’m not making this up, “You can’t get killed. How would I tell your readers how much they mean to you?”

So, what I’m saying is, you guys are my homies. I do not, for a second, take you for granted. Where else am I gonna find people who have such great taste in literature? 😀